Measuring Developer Experience

Developer experience is one of those things that is easily recognizable when it’s bad but difficult to articulate why. A recent paper DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity presents a useful framework for thinking about and measuring it.

In practice, I found that measuring perception is vital to DevEx at a larger organization. For product engineers in particular, switching from manually refreshing a browser compared to auto-reload makes a huge difference in perceived speed even though the actual time saved is not that large (compared to someone using keyboard shortcuts to switch to the browser and refresh).

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